Overclocked Performance Summary

I have really changed how I do my overclock testing with motherboards. Every single test you see in the main section is repeated in the section that follows, including power consumption. As I test more products, a good picture of overclocking efficiency should emerge, which should prove interesting when it comes to those products that are 100% overclocking-oriented. I have grouped the results into sections here, and all Intel products are tested with 4.6 GHz CPU speed. Memory speeds vary depending on the platform's ability. I will report it here if a board fails to pass one of these tests, I need to increase voltages, or am perhaps allowed to drop voltages.


Both the hardware and its BIOS design show that the ASUS RAMPAGE IV BLACK EDITION was built with overclocking as its sole focus. With that in mind, reaching "normal" 24/7 overclocks was as easy as could be, and I managed to reach my "reference" 4.6 GHz OC with just 1.365 V, which is 0.10 V less than on most other boards I have tested with this CPU. ASUS spent considerable time optimizing the BIOSes of their ROG products to provide just this experience, and no matter what memory kit I decided to add into the mix, I did not encounter any of the problems I normally do, although getting kits with 8 GB DIMMs to work can prove difficult. I did not spend any time at all optimizing the BIOS for performance in these benchmarks – this is how the board behaves right out of the box and with minimal adjustments. I know for a fact that more performance is possible, and had I taken the time, you would see the ASUS RAMPAGE IV BLACK EDITION at the top of every benchmark instead of where it sits now. ASUS has such performance in mind for every part the board is fitted with. No matter what hardware you throw at the RAMPAGE IV BLACK EDITION, it is ready. But its wide compatibility comes at a price as getting the most REQUIRES you to tweak settings manually.

AIDA64

CPU OC Performance

3D-Oriented OC Performance

3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage

3DMark11 and PCMark 07

3DMark and PCMark8

Metro: Last Light

Sniper Elite V2

Shogun 2

F1 2010